FWIW, I'm in England and the usual protocol here if you report by telephone is that you are responsible for safeguarding the goods until the waiting period is up.
Of course I'd like to help the police solve crimes. I feel it is my civic duty.
Noooo. I think you have an honourable ideal which, via a fallacious appeal to authority, has led you to an incorrect conclusion. It may be your civic duty to help stop crime, when your circumstances have given you unique access to something, but that does not translate into helping the police, merely helping the victim. This means getting the police involved when you have something, but not allowing the police to get involved with you just because they think they have something.
For example, a month ago I found a large amount of money on the ground. It was entirely appropriate to report that I had found it, because otherwise it would have probably been blown away and collected in smaller amounts. I had a unique access to something, and my involving the police provided a central point of contact for someone perhaps not very well off who may have been desperately searching for this wad of cash which he had carelessly allowed to fall out of his pocket.
The best-case scenario is that no-one comes forward and I get to legally keep it (this was the outcome - woot). The worst-case scenario is that someone was going to report a serious crime involving the loss of money, and then my fingerprints etc would probably be requested as these would have been on the cash and would have to be eliminated. I abhor the idea of the police collecting my DNA, especially because I know it will never really be erased, but I took the risk because I thought the alternative - someone desperate losing a large amount of money because of my concern for myself - was worse.
There would be a contract specifying the terms under which the sample was provided, an agreement for the subsequent sample and data destruction when the investigation ends, and some kind of penalty if the agreement wasn't followed.
Yes, please do "have your lawyer involved", as he will very quickly explain to you that statute overrides contract, especially when it comes to the privileges of the police:-). If you think you can cut a deal with them, you are forgetting that you are not dealing with a civilian subject to the same laws as you. Sure, they might sign an agreement [they know has no legal force], and you might try to sue for breach, and you might have more lawyers than Her Majesty's police service, but if the police have statute to override your contract, you will have just earned yourself a very expensive lesson in imbalance of power.
Well, the only time I am paid for IT services is when something is outsourced to me, so my vested interest should be to tell everyone that they are incompetent and should rely upon me... except that I get more satisfaction teaching people how to do things for themselves.
Maintaining an SMB IT environment is like looking after a small garden: you pay someone else for good seeds, you pay someone else for good tools, but it is your experience with that particular environment which allows you to create something appealing to its users and maintains the health of the land.
Google does not develop tools for you: it develops tools for a lowest common denominator, and expects you to adapt to what it has available. Isn't the biggest benefit of electronic collaboration the ability to automate market-specific operations which previously had to be done manually? Otherwise you just have the paper office without paper. Google does not maintain the health of your business: it has no concern for the privacy of your data; it doesn't know that it would be problematic if it went down tomorrow at 9 PM because you would be waiting for something particularly important.
At the SMB level, you are basically stating that "it is pretty hard to compete with" someone installing exim and a nice HTML front-end on Debian stable and running an upgrade script every evening. I bet you'd have uptime to beat GMail, if you had two independent lines and were based somewhere relatively urban, because Debian have already got "pretty good at" providing a stable server suite long ago. But so what?
small SMBs have been outsourcing their IT for years - though "outsourcing their IT" probably translates to "get Dave's son to do it, he knows about computers".
Welcome to C21. Dave's son is now in the job market, and part of his employability at the SMB comes from his ability to do the IT work. Of course there will remain a significant proportion of sole proprietorships or similar where someone else has to be brought in, but the proportion goes down as everyone is brought up familiar with - rather than afraid of - the computer.
But today there are dozens of companies offering outsourced Exchange, or you can sign up for Google for Domains and the price is so cheap that there is no way a single full-time IT person (even if you ignore their salary) can compete economically
Wait, are you arguing that somewhere with up to 200 employees could get by with 0 in IT? The efficiency of the computer system has such an effect on the efficiency of every single employee in an office environment, but you want to do delegate this responsibility to... no-one? Some support contract involving an unknown, barely familiar with the company, visiting when there is a crisis? This is false economy. To build the strawman "well, you don't need a full-time Exchange server admin!" is obtuse.
spam filtering which doesn't leave people crying
What is your IT department doing wrong? SA+antivirus+sanity checks at MX level have given me fewer false positives than any year I try GMail and quickly retreat with disappointment. If you want outsourced small business mail (clearly your focus) done right, you need to look at the dedicated mail providers such as Tuffmail.
it's cheaper to have a spares cupboard containing enough spare PCs to re-equip an entire team at a moment's notice
In this unmanaged scenario, where has all the data gone? Who is deploying these machines?
won't be particularly elegantly managed (there may not be a domain, antivirus may be totally forgotten about, they certainly won't have a standardised build) but let's be honest here - how many non-techies ever display any sign of caring about any of that?
Some. Those who don't experience endless problems, shout at their computer a lot, and most importantly from a business PoV, waste time and lose data (to nowhere if they are lucky, to a competitor if they're unlucky).
if you want steady employment with minimal risk of finding that not only are you redundant from your current post
Oh, I'm one of the guys people outsource to. But it's just a bit of fun on the side, and I'm more interested in taking a fee to teach self-reliance than to keep people dependent on others.
I am not quite sure what you are talking about. Because everyone has access to yesteryear's supercomputer on their desktop, there is no reason whatever to go back to a 1960s outsourcing model. If you want to distribute load over your machines, go ahead! But why do it over someone else's?
If you think this is going to reduce IT expenditure requirements, you have barely worked a minute in IT. When you outsource, you are simply paying someone else to do your job, plus profit, plus a gaggle of negotiators in middle management collecting their kickbacks, plus downtime costs because your business is less important to them than your business is to you (if you have enterprise e-mail and it has been down more than, say, GMail, you have done something very wrong)...
Sir, I had quite some trouble wading through your marketing speak -- "revolutionary [surely not, SSDs don't rotate?] rather than evolutionary", "a big change is coming", "an extinction level event", "the situation got dynamic" -- but I think what you were trying to get out over those seven paragraphs is "in the limit as technology becomes more perfect, stuff is slower to read if you have to physically move to it".
Well, maybe, but perfection is never attained. And, though Google is hypocritical enough to imply to you that you should trust a single large entity with all your data, it knows perfectly well in-house that the best approach to storage is lots of copies over lots of cheap equipment. As long as throwaway hard drives are fast enough - and even cheap hard drives are going to give you many more writes than SSDs - we will be staying with hard drives, thanks. Like all salesmen since the dawn of time, you can shill the great new thing, but all businesses and consumers need (whatever technocrats tell them) is the cheapest solution that is good enough. Your brushing over the most important point, that SSDs are "still not competetive with consumer magneto-mechanical media", betrays your loyalty.
Women and men do not need to be ashamed of their bodies. It is disappointing that Apple is contributing to the harmful Abrahamic stereotype that your body is dirty and something to be ashamed of - in particular, it seems here that Apple is telling women to cover up (and get back to the kitchen?), even having a problem with swimwear merchant apps.
I'm afraid we're also going to have to confiscate that.
In the UK, the government is already allowing pollution to the 3-30MHz spectrum, which will lead to a reduction in short wave listeners and HF amateur radio users, which will in turn eventually lead to closing down of services due to "lack of demand".
This is done through generous EU self-certification requirements for electronic devices, so in particular HPA and other BT-provided home powerline networking products radiate broadband noise up to a few hundred metres away. With hundreds of thousands of units installed and in use, this often makes reception difficult in urban areas.
The regulator, Ofcom, clearly underreports the number of complaints, stating that it will only investigate individual cases (i.e. every single time there is a shortwave listener or other HF radio user within close proximity of such a device) rather than enacting a ban/confiscation of products which effectively act as unlicensed transmitters, using the house wiring as an antenna.
The short wave radio band is the only infrastructure-free method for worldwide communication, i.e. it is the only truly free worldwide communication method. It would be cost-prohibitive to censor it with broadband jammers (as opposed to the specific frequency jammers used especially throughout the Cold War); getting the citizens to purchase equipment to do the job instead is very effective, and takes the cynical approach that one might now have to sour relationships with his own neighbours to fix the problem.
I, for one, will be using my "end of Cold War" era Yaesu FRG-7700 shortwave radio to search for broadcasts from the Free World. Could any of you guys tell me which direction I should be pointing my antenna, in order to get the best reception from signals bouncing over the Wall? My map isn't even clear where the border lies any more; all I know is that I'm on the wrong side.
"Intelligence == ability" wasn't being argued, just that intelligence (with physical health) is much more likely to lead to ability than anything else.
but it's also the fundamental premise of the employment process (or should be at least)
The past few decades of testing have revealed that your intelligence is set before and during the early very years of your life, and that intelligence is strongly correlated with performance at cerebral tasks. So, it is as unfair to judge you by your ability as by your race, and it makes little sense to be annoyed that you are turned down by one but not the other. While you may feel you got where you are by working hard, the underlying requirements of good intellectual and physical health were the most important contribution to your current status, and these requirements are satisfied as genetically as your skin colour.
The basic message is that life is not fair, and while equal opportunity law adjusts for one unfairness, it is impossible to correct them all.
Unless you're referring to something like the Open University in the United Kingdom (also trying to make the move to GMail, though at least there is some objection), why would you need half a million accounts? If alumni get to keep their address for a while, surely require them to provide a forwarding mailbox?
If it is very difficult to change someone's name in a mail system, you are probably hiring the wrong staff. This is the sort of thing that happens so often that you should have scripted down to being able to type move_mailbox old_address new_address "New Name", or simply parsing the list of name change requests that comes from admin, with a dry run option to make sure it has been interpreted sanely.
Yes, account passwords do get guessed (do you have strong password enforcement?), and if the major ISP can automatically detect spam flowing from your systems, so can you. Looking at it the other way, I am far more likely to see spam from a free e-mail account than a university server with what is probably a compromised account, so it is clear that at least some administrators are doing a fine job.
As for central points of failure, it is good that you have identified one,... now, since lack of power affects the whole university, not just you, I'm assuming the University have dealt with it by having more than one local power alternative (assuming also you cannot afford to process mail across two sites).
E-mail software: did VAXclustering in the '80s, or cloud computing this decade, teach you nothing? Spread your load across cheap machines with (hopefully dynamic) splitting of responsibility for various accounts at different stages if necessary. And if you're surprised that you need to "modify default install scenarios to less commonly known setups", I just don't know what to say except that that's precisely what IT staff are supposed to be competent to do.
Integration? Anything specialist won't be supported by GMail either, and will be far harder to integrate.
Mobile devices? Support IMAP.
"Modern" UI? What does that even mean? If you mean HTML front-ends, there are dozens of open source IMAP front-ends from roundmail to zimbra you can install and keep up-to-date.
Finally, Google's spam filtration was nowhere near as good, when I used it, as the combination of SA tweaked with the training contributions of thousands of users, antivirus and a few sanity checks at the MX (tweakable by admin and users, not at the mercy of Google). The fact is, Google does not "specialise" in mail any more than you do: it is another finger in an ever-increasing number of pies.
In summary: 1. You are more competent, or have the potential to be more competent, than you seem to think you are; 2. Google are able, but not as competent as you seem to be hoping they are; 3. It's your mail - keep a hold of it.
In my post above, I didn't suggest any context whatever for the quote, beyond showing you where it came from.
However, you're giving a horribly generous spin to what Schmidt actually said.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That statement is abundantly clear, and is one of the most concise descriptions I've seen of what it means to be against privacy. He hasn't said "maybe you'll be monitored", "maybe you'll be caught", "please be careful" or even the more ballsy "maybe you should be using strong encryption" - he says "maybe you shouldn't be doing it [online] [at all]". And it's not as if he's said "have something illegal", where he'd have to choose his words carefully - just having something you want to keep private is enough.
The Internet is now an essential work and leisure tool for hundreds of millions of people, and to tell them that they shouldn't be doing things online at all unless they're happy for anyone to know about it would usually be expected from the rantings of a petty dictatorial government official. When you hear it from a highly competent CEO with more information about you than any other corporation, it's something to be highly concerned about.
If someone has something they want to do because they believe it is morally correct to do so, e.g. write an article in defence of some abused group, but that person is concerned about others finding out (who the whistleblower is, say), then the last thing they should be told is, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
But whose fault is it that information might end up in someone else's hands? The PATRIOT Act's, you say? No:
the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time
"The reality" is Google's choosing to hold information for a long time, even when they know it could be demanded under warrant. The PATRIOT Act is wrong, but Google's complicity is evident. Every abuse of power needs one dictator and one willing soldier boy.
Though I do use Pine on occasion, mainly when suffering from truly bad connectivity, like Cambodian dialup.
Understood! Take a close relation, an agricultural engineer whose interest is irrigation planning in developing countries.
There are whole research groups where work means being as far as can be imagined from a decent water supply, let alone a stable 'net connection. It is entirely against the spirit of academia to optimise for the best connected with the beefiest machines and the least need for privacy, while handing over a chunk of the responsibility for reliable contact in a remote location to a third party.
If students really want GMail, that is hardly a problem: let them spend five minutes setting up such an account, then provide a forwarding mechanism from the university system or even allow a preferred alternative contact address in the event that you do not care to always keep records.
I'm usually using one of Outlook 2007, Apple Mail or SquirrelMail. I used to use Pine from time to time but it's been a while. It's great to have so many options. I do send and read mails by default in plaintext, though I will view the HTML part if the sender is trusted (i.e. if I'm particularly bored and want to read some solicited marketing communication).
A state-of-the-art interface is a modern IMAP mail client. GMail is a horrible bodge, although if you want to make do with using HTML to access mail, don't complain about the principle when your actual problem is the particular web interface(s) chosen. There are dozens of alternatives to choose from, your administrator could install several, and you even have the option of implementing/deploying an independent front end yourself, which merely talks IMAP to your chosen server.
Personally, I/hate/ complex JavaScript as an approach to application delivery: it is slow, it is bloated, nothing works quite as you expect, and it is not as integrated as a native interface. If I want a web front end, it is because I want something extremely lightweight for temporary access, often from a restricted connection - although I'd still rather have the option that allows me to download and read off-line.
I work at a University that has recently outsourced their student e-mail to GMail. The University IT group has really bad management. There is a CIO, 3 Vice Presidents and 5 directors for an IT group roughly 300 people with 70% of them being contractors. Each group within the IT group (Exchange, Unix, NT, Mail, Helpdesk, Networking...) has their own 1 or 2 managers.
I'd pretty much agree with this. The trend of University outsourcing is the result of symptoms caused by bad management. As you describe, the management will have become bloated and influenced by consultants with deep conflicts of interest.
The money is being wasted on these managers and consultants, and that is where the budget cuts need to be made - not in actually providing services to students. Also, a couple of excellent IT admins and some commodity hardware is cheaper than a dozen pen-pushers!
(Also, I probably wouldn't recommend VMS as a mail system today. While it's still incredibly robust, and until 4 years ago I was collecting mail from an AlphaServer which, IIRC, *never* crashed while deployed, Fiorina had already dealt HP a death blow in enterprise innovation.)
Tell me, please: what is almost impossible about running a distributed mail server cluster for a few tens of thousands of users and 100% cluster uptime? This has been a common achievement implemented using VAXclusters in academia since the '80s, so I'm curious as to what's gone wrong with engineering ability since then.
I get this impression sometimes that people think 100% availability via "cloud" distributed computing is an invention of this century. The only thing that's new is assuming that all but a few large corporations are sufficiently competent to do something that local IT was expected to do: then with expensive, hard-to-replace machines.
Those who have marked this down as flamebait probably missed that this was quoting the opinion on privacy of Eric Schmidt, CEO/Chairman of Google Inc.:
ARMs have integer DIV now? How can I show off the barrel shifter?!
Oh, phew, it's only the heretical Thumb-2 instruction set.
Anyway, my Acorn A3000 charged the onboard button-ish cell, and the PSU was so badly shielded it might as well have been powered by sunlight. I call prior art.
I would think Microsoft and Facebook also have similar quantities of NSA certified engineers in ratio to their size.
Don't guess; provide evidence. Then explain why it's a problem that Facebook, an isolated provider of a social entertainment service which anyone can avoid, might be closely monitored. As to Microsoft, it would be of concern if there was evidence their software was leaking private information, but 30 years of Microsoft have shown us otherwise. Google wants all your information on their machines, whereas Microsoft has grown by making sure its software is on your machine. It is Google which is considering a system in the UK which would mean a substantial part of UK data goes through Google.
Even if you dismiss the existing (ab)uses of data by Google as acceptable, including the openly admitted retention when law enforcement warrants are inevitable (aggregate!), the tremendous potential for abuse by future owners of Google and collaborations with governments can be best limited during Google's early years.
"You require NSA clearance for any significant technical positions." Do you agree with that position? Yes or no.
But the world is not black and white, and a statement is not either completely correct or deserving of dismissal. His apparent underlying message - be wary of a company whose main asset is your information and with a number of NSA cleared employees in sigificant positions (among other problems) - holds. Especially when that company tries to make inroads into information infrastructure in foreign nations such as mine.
My guess is you are an INTP from your arguing style.
I will leave psychological testing to the psychologists:-).
You have no proof to backup the claim that all the top google engineers are all NSA.
It is a strawman in the following ways:
(1) "Are NSA" suggests that they are part of the NSA. This is not the same thing as having "NSA clearance" by any reasonable interpretation. I'd interpret "NSA clearance" to mean "security clearance performed by the NSA", and I'd even forgive the obtuse interpretation "has security clearance to work at the NSA" (which might be made by someone unaware that NSA is involved in processing US security clearances in general), but I can't come to the interpetation "works for the NSA".
You've turned the claim of requiring clearance to that of being part of the NSA.
(2) "Top engineer" is not the same as "significant technical position". There are some academically excellent people at Google, i.e. top engineers, who may have very little input in the technical direction of the company.
You've reworded a suggestion about decision makers at Google into one about great engineers at Google.
Yes I would assume there would bequite a few NSA clearance positions as in other companies of that size.
(a) Why would you assume that?
(b) What have other companies got to do with it? The NSA's interest is information about people, so you only need be very concerned about a company with a bunch of NSA-cleared decision makers if the company's prime asset is information about you.
If there where listings for hundreds of jobs, I'd say you had a point. But there is not.
This is a growth of your straw man (2) above. Now it's not just those in significant positions, not just top engineers, but "hundreds" of engineers for which you want proof of having required NSA clearance. I can confirm that you're not going to find this - indeed, I know at least one non-US ex-Googler engineer who worked on the US campus.
To conclude, your requirement for evidence of a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
FWIW, I'm in England and the usual protocol here if you report by telephone is that you are responsible for safeguarding the goods until the waiting period is up.
Of course I'd like to help the police solve crimes. I feel it is my civic duty.
Noooo. I think you have an honourable ideal which, via a fallacious appeal to authority, has led you to an incorrect conclusion. It may be your civic duty to help stop crime, when your circumstances have given you unique access to something, but that does not translate into helping the police, merely helping the victim. This means getting the police involved when you have something, but not allowing the police to get involved with you just because they think they have something.
For example, a month ago I found a large amount of money on the ground. It was entirely appropriate to report that I had found it, because otherwise it would have probably been blown away and collected in smaller amounts. I had a unique access to something, and my involving the police provided a central point of contact for someone perhaps not very well off who may have been desperately searching for this wad of cash which he had carelessly allowed to fall out of his pocket.
The best-case scenario is that no-one comes forward and I get to legally keep it (this was the outcome - woot). The worst-case scenario is that someone was going to report a serious crime involving the loss of money, and then my fingerprints etc would probably be requested as these would have been on the cash and would have to be eliminated. I abhor the idea of the police collecting my DNA, especially because I know it will never really be erased, but I took the risk because I thought the alternative - someone desperate losing a large amount of money because of my concern for myself - was worse.
There would be a contract specifying the terms under which the sample was provided, an agreement for the subsequent sample and data destruction when the investigation ends, and some kind of penalty if the agreement wasn't followed.
Yes, please do "have your lawyer involved", as he will very quickly explain to you that statute overrides contract, especially when it comes to the privileges of the police :-). If you think you can cut a deal with them, you are forgetting that you are not dealing with a civilian subject to the same laws as you. Sure, they might sign an agreement [they know has no legal force], and you might try to sue for breach, and you might have more lawyers than Her Majesty's police service, but if the police have statute to override your contract, you will have just earned yourself a very expensive lesson in imbalance of power.
Well, the only time I am paid for IT services is when something is outsourced to me, so my vested interest should be to tell everyone that they are incompetent and should rely upon me... except that I get more satisfaction teaching people how to do things for themselves.
Maintaining an SMB IT environment is like looking after a small garden: you pay someone else for good seeds, you pay someone else for good tools, but it is your experience with that particular environment which allows you to create something appealing to its users and maintains the health of the land.
Google does not develop tools for you: it develops tools for a lowest common denominator, and expects you to adapt to what it has available. Isn't the biggest benefit of electronic collaboration the ability to automate market-specific operations which previously had to be done manually? Otherwise you just have the paper office without paper. Google does not maintain the health of your business: it has no concern for the privacy of your data; it doesn't know that it would be problematic if it went down tomorrow at 9 PM because you would be waiting for something particularly important.
At the SMB level, you are basically stating that "it is pretty hard to compete with" someone installing exim and a nice HTML front-end on Debian stable and running an upgrade script every evening. I bet you'd have uptime to beat GMail, if you had two independent lines and were based somewhere relatively urban, because Debian have already got "pretty good at" providing a stable server suite long ago. But so what?
small SMBs have been outsourcing their IT for years - though "outsourcing their IT" probably translates to "get Dave's son to do it, he knows about computers".
Welcome to C21. Dave's son is now in the job market, and part of his employability at the SMB comes from his ability to do the IT work. Of course there will remain a significant proportion of sole proprietorships or similar where someone else has to be brought in, but the proportion goes down as everyone is brought up familiar with - rather than afraid of - the computer.
But today there are dozens of companies offering outsourced Exchange, or you can sign up for Google for Domains and the price is so cheap that there is no way a single full-time IT person (even if you ignore their salary) can compete economically
Wait, are you arguing that somewhere with up to 200 employees could get by with 0 in IT? The efficiency of the computer system has such an effect on the efficiency of every single employee in an office environment, but you want to do delegate this responsibility to... no-one? Some support contract involving an unknown, barely familiar with the company, visiting when there is a crisis? This is false economy. To build the strawman "well, you don't need a full-time Exchange server admin!" is obtuse.
spam filtering which doesn't leave people crying
What is your IT department doing wrong? SA+antivirus+sanity checks at MX level have given me fewer false positives than any year I try GMail and quickly retreat with disappointment. If you want outsourced small business mail (clearly your focus) done right, you need to look at the dedicated mail providers such as Tuffmail.
it's cheaper to have a spares cupboard containing enough spare PCs to re-equip an entire team at a moment's notice
In this unmanaged scenario, where has all the data gone? Who is deploying these machines?
won't be particularly elegantly managed (there may not be a domain, antivirus may be totally forgotten about, they certainly won't have a standardised build) but let's be honest here - how many non-techies ever display any sign of caring about any of that?
Some. Those who don't experience endless problems, shout at their computer a lot, and most importantly from a business PoV, waste time and lose data (to nowhere if they are lucky, to a competitor if they're unlucky).
if you want steady employment with minimal risk of finding that not only are you redundant from your current post
Oh, I'm one of the guys people outsource to. But it's just a bit of fun on the side, and I'm more interested in taking a fee to teach self-reliance than to keep people dependent on others.
I am not quite sure what you are talking about. Because everyone has access to yesteryear's supercomputer on their desktop, there is no reason whatever to go back to a 1960s outsourcing model. If you want to distribute load over your machines, go ahead! But why do it over someone else's?
If you think this is going to reduce IT expenditure requirements, you have barely worked a minute in IT. When you outsource, you are simply paying someone else to do your job, plus profit, plus a gaggle of negotiators in middle management collecting their kickbacks, plus downtime costs because your business is less important to them than your business is to you (if you have enterprise e-mail and it has been down more than, say, GMail, you have done something very wrong)...
Sir, I had quite some trouble wading through your marketing speak -- "revolutionary [surely not, SSDs don't rotate?] rather than evolutionary", "a big change is coming", "an extinction level event", "the situation got dynamic" -- but I think what you were trying to get out over those seven paragraphs is "in the limit as technology becomes more perfect, stuff is slower to read if you have to physically move to it".
Well, maybe, but perfection is never attained. And, though Google is hypocritical enough to imply to you that you should trust a single large entity with all your data, it knows perfectly well in-house that the best approach to storage is lots of copies over lots of cheap equipment. As long as throwaway hard drives are fast enough - and even cheap hard drives are going to give you many more writes than SSDs - we will be staying with hard drives, thanks. Like all salesmen since the dawn of time, you can shill the great new thing, but all businesses and consumers need (whatever technocrats tell them) is the cheapest solution that is good enough. Your brushing over the most important point, that SSDs are "still not competetive with consumer magneto-mechanical media", betrays your loyalty.
name : claim : employer : primary product of employer
Lessig : freedom : Harvard : corporate lawyers
Stallman : freedom : MIT : corporate technocrats
Women and men do not need to be ashamed of their bodies. It is disappointing that Apple is contributing to the harmful Abrahamic stereotype that your body is dirty and something to be ashamed of - in particular, it seems here that Apple is telling women to cover up (and get back to the kitchen?), even having a problem with swimwear merchant apps.
OP was clearly referring to _Down and out in Paris and London_, which is what you will be after you try to take your iPhone in for service.
I'm afraid we're also going to have to confiscate that.
In the UK, the government is already allowing pollution to the 3-30MHz spectrum, which will lead to a reduction in short wave listeners and HF amateur radio users, which will in turn eventually lead to closing down of services due to "lack of demand".
This is done through generous EU self-certification requirements for electronic devices, so in particular HPA and other BT-provided home powerline networking products radiate broadband noise up to a few hundred metres away. With hundreds of thousands of units installed and in use, this often makes reception difficult in urban areas.
The regulator, Ofcom, clearly underreports the number of complaints, stating that it will only investigate individual cases (i.e. every single time there is a shortwave listener or other HF radio user within close proximity of such a device) rather than enacting a ban/confiscation of products which effectively act as unlicensed transmitters, using the house wiring as an antenna.
The short wave radio band is the only infrastructure-free method for worldwide communication, i.e. it is the only truly free worldwide communication method. It would be cost-prohibitive to censor it with broadband jammers (as opposed to the specific frequency jammers used especially throughout the Cold War); getting the citizens to purchase equipment to do the job instead is very effective, and takes the cynical approach that one might now have to sour relationships with his own neighbours to fix the problem.
UKQRM for more information.
I, for one, will be using my "end of Cold War" era Yaesu FRG-7700 shortwave radio to search for broadcasts from the Free World. Could any of you guys tell me which direction I should be pointing my antenna, in order to get the best reception from signals bouncing over the Wall? My map isn't even clear where the border lies any more; all I know is that I'm on the wrong side.
"Intelligence == ability" wasn't being argued, just that intelligence (with physical health) is much more likely to lead to ability than anything else.
but it's also the fundamental premise of the employment process (or should be at least)
Why should it be? What premises are you using?
it's also downright insulting
The past few decades of testing have revealed that your intelligence is set before and during the early very years of your life, and that intelligence is strongly correlated with performance at cerebral tasks. So, it is as unfair to judge you by your ability as by your race, and it makes little sense to be annoyed that you are turned down by one but not the other. While you may feel you got where you are by working hard, the underlying requirements of good intellectual and physical health were the most important contribution to your current status, and these requirements are satisfied as genetically as your skin colour.
The basic message is that life is not fair, and while equal opportunity law adjusts for one unfairness, it is impossible to correct them all.
Unless you're referring to something like the Open University in the United Kingdom (also trying to make the move to GMail, though at least there is some objection), why would you need half a million accounts? If alumni get to keep their address for a while, surely require them to provide a forwarding mailbox?
If it is very difficult to change someone's name in a mail system, you are probably hiring the wrong staff. This is the sort of thing that happens so often that you should have scripted down to being able to type move_mailbox old_address new_address "New Name", or simply parsing the list of name change requests that comes from admin, with a dry run option to make sure it has been interpreted sanely.
Yes, account passwords do get guessed (do you have strong password enforcement?), and if the major ISP can automatically detect spam flowing from your systems, so can you. Looking at it the other way, I am far more likely to see spam from a free e-mail account than a university server with what is probably a compromised account, so it is clear that at least some administrators are doing a fine job.
As for central points of failure, it is good that you have identified one,... now, since lack of power affects the whole university, not just you, I'm assuming the University have dealt with it by having more than one local power alternative (assuming also you cannot afford to process mail across two sites).
E-mail software: did VAXclustering in the '80s, or cloud computing this decade, teach you nothing? Spread your load across cheap machines with (hopefully dynamic) splitting of responsibility for various accounts at different stages if necessary. And if you're surprised that you need to "modify default install scenarios to less commonly known setups", I just don't know what to say except that that's precisely what IT staff are supposed to be competent to do.
Integration? Anything specialist won't be supported by GMail either, and will be far harder to integrate.
Mobile devices? Support IMAP.
"Modern" UI? What does that even mean? If you mean HTML front-ends, there are dozens of open source IMAP front-ends from roundmail to zimbra you can install and keep up-to-date.
Finally, Google's spam filtration was nowhere near as good, when I used it, as the combination of SA tweaked with the training contributions of thousands of users, antivirus and a few sanity checks at the MX (tweakable by admin and users, not at the mercy of Google). The fact is, Google does not "specialise" in mail any more than you do: it is another finger in an ever-increasing number of pies.
In summary:
1. You are more competent, or have the potential to be more competent, than you seem to think you are;
2. Google are able, but not as competent as you seem to be hoping they are;
3. It's your mail - keep a hold of it.
In my post above, I didn't suggest any context whatever for the quote, beyond showing you where it came from.
However, you're giving a horribly generous spin to what Schmidt actually said.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
That statement is abundantly clear, and is one of the most concise descriptions I've seen of what it means to be against privacy. He hasn't said "maybe you'll be monitored", "maybe you'll be caught", "please be careful" or even the more ballsy "maybe you should be using strong encryption" - he says "maybe you shouldn't be doing it [online] [at all]". And it's not as if he's said "have something illegal", where he'd have to choose his words carefully - just having something you want to keep private is enough.
The Internet is now an essential work and leisure tool for hundreds of millions of people, and to tell them that they shouldn't be doing things online at all unless they're happy for anyone to know about it would usually be expected from the rantings of a petty dictatorial government official. When you hear it from a highly competent CEO with more information about you than any other corporation, it's something to be highly concerned about.
If someone has something they want to do because they believe it is morally correct to do so, e.g. write an article in defence of some abused group, but that person is concerned about others finding out (who the whistleblower is, say), then the last thing they should be told is, "maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."
But whose fault is it that information might end up in someone else's hands? The PATRIOT Act's, you say? No:
the reality is that search engines including Google do retain this information for some time
"The reality" is Google's choosing to hold information for a long time, even when they know it could be demanded under warrant. The PATRIOT Act is wrong, but Google's complicity is evident. Every abuse of power needs one dictator and one willing soldier boy.
Though I do use Pine on occasion, mainly when suffering from truly bad connectivity, like Cambodian dialup.
Understood! Take a close relation, an agricultural engineer whose interest is irrigation planning in developing countries.
There are whole research groups where work means being as far as can be imagined from a decent water supply, let alone a stable 'net connection. It is entirely against the spirit of academia to optimise for the best connected with the beefiest machines and the least need for privacy, while handing over a chunk of the responsibility for reliable contact in a remote location to a third party.
If students really want GMail, that is hardly a problem: let them spend five minutes setting up such an account, then provide a forwarding mechanism from the university system or even allow a preferred alternative contact address in the event that you do not care to always keep records.
In tech, the first decade is always free.
I'm usually using one of Outlook 2007, Apple Mail or SquirrelMail. I used to use Pine from time to time but it's been a while. It's great to have so many options. I do send and read mails by default in plaintext, though I will view the HTML part if the sender is trusted (i.e. if I'm particularly bored and want to read some solicited marketing communication).
Do I fit into the stereotype you predicted?
A state-of-the-art interface is a modern IMAP mail client. GMail is a horrible bodge, although if you want to make do with using HTML to access mail, don't complain about the principle when your actual problem is the particular web interface(s) chosen. There are dozens of alternatives to choose from, your administrator could install several, and you even have the option of implementing/deploying an independent front end yourself, which merely talks IMAP to your chosen server.
Personally, I /hate/ complex JavaScript as an approach to application delivery: it is slow, it is bloated, nothing works quite as you expect, and it is not as integrated as a native interface. If I want a web front end, it is because I want something extremely lightweight for temporary access, often from a restricted connection - although I'd still rather have the option that allows me to download and read off-line.
I work at a University that has recently outsourced their student e-mail to GMail. The University IT group has really bad management. There is a CIO, 3 Vice Presidents and 5 directors for an IT group roughly 300 people with 70% of them being contractors. Each group within the IT group (Exchange, Unix, NT, Mail, Helpdesk, Networking...) has their own 1 or 2 managers.
I'd pretty much agree with this. The trend of University outsourcing is the result of symptoms caused by bad management. As you describe, the management will have become bloated and influenced by consultants with deep conflicts of interest.
The money is being wasted on these managers and consultants, and that is where the budget cuts need to be made - not in actually providing services to students. Also, a couple of excellent IT admins and some commodity hardware is cheaper than a dozen pen-pushers!
(Also, I probably wouldn't recommend VMS as a mail system today. While it's still incredibly robust, and until 4 years ago I was collecting mail from an AlphaServer which, IIRC, *never* crashed while deployed, Fiorina had already dealt HP a death blow in enterprise innovation.)
Tell me, please: what is almost impossible about running a distributed mail server cluster for a few tens of thousands of users and 100% cluster uptime? This has been a common achievement implemented using VAXclusters in academia since the '80s, so I'm curious as to what's gone wrong with engineering ability since then.
I get this impression sometimes that people think 100% availability via "cloud" distributed computing is an invention of this century. The only thing that's new is assuming that all but a few large corporations are sufficiently competent to do something that local IT was expected to do: then with expensive, hard-to-replace machines.
Those who have marked this down as flamebait probably missed that this was quoting the opinion on privacy of Eric Schmidt, CEO/Chairman of Google Inc.:
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"
ARMs have integer DIV now? How can I show off the barrel shifter?!
Oh, phew, it's only the heretical Thumb-2 instruction set.
Anyway, my Acorn A3000 charged the onboard button-ish cell, and the PSU was so badly shielded it might as well have been powered by sunlight. I call prior art.
I would think Microsoft and Facebook also have similar quantities of NSA certified engineers in ratio to their size.
Don't guess; provide evidence. Then explain why it's a problem that Facebook, an isolated provider of a social entertainment service which anyone can avoid, might be closely monitored. As to Microsoft, it would be of concern if there was evidence their software was leaking private information, but 30 years of Microsoft have shown us otherwise. Google wants all your information on their machines, whereas Microsoft has grown by making sure its software is on your machine. It is Google which is considering a system in the UK which would mean a substantial part of UK data goes through Google.
Even if you dismiss the existing (ab)uses of data by Google as acceptable, including the openly admitted retention when law enforcement warrants are inevitable (aggregate!), the tremendous potential for abuse by future owners of Google and collaborations with governments can be best limited during Google's early years.
"You require NSA clearance for any significant technical positions." Do you agree with that position? Yes or no.
No. I indicated that AC was exaggerating here.
But the world is not black and white, and a statement is not either completely correct or deserving of dismissal. His apparent underlying message - be wary of a company whose main asset is your information and with a number of NSA cleared employees in sigificant positions (among other problems) - holds. Especially when that company tries to make inroads into information infrastructure in foreign nations such as mine.
My guess is you are an INTP from your arguing style.
I will leave psychological testing to the psychologists :-).
Your strawman to AC was:
You have no proof to backup the claim that all the top google engineers are all NSA.
It is a strawman in the following ways:
(1) "Are NSA" suggests that they are part of the NSA. This is not the same thing as having "NSA clearance" by any reasonable interpretation. I'd interpret "NSA clearance" to mean "security clearance performed by the NSA", and I'd even forgive the obtuse interpretation "has security clearance to work at the NSA" (which might be made by someone unaware that NSA is involved in processing US security clearances in general), but I can't come to the interpetation "works for the NSA".
You've turned the claim of requiring clearance to that of being part of the NSA.
(2) "Top engineer" is not the same as "significant technical position". There are some academically excellent people at Google, i.e. top engineers, who may have very little input in the technical direction of the company.
You've reworded a suggestion about decision makers at Google into one about great engineers at Google.
Yes I would assume there would bequite a few NSA clearance positions as in other companies of that size.
(a) Why would you assume that?
(b) What have other companies got to do with it? The NSA's interest is information about people, so you only need be very concerned about a company with a bunch of NSA-cleared decision makers if the company's prime asset is information about you.
If there where listings for hundreds of jobs, I'd say you had a point. But there is not.
This is a growth of your straw man (2) above. Now it's not just those in significant positions, not just top engineers, but "hundreds" of engineers for which you want proof of having required NSA clearance. I can confirm that you're not going to find this - indeed, I know at least one non-US ex-Googler engineer who worked on the US campus.
To conclude, your requirement for evidence of a conspiracy involving hundreds of Google employees is absurd.